Civilians to staff crisis calls in new program

Pilot calls for teams around Toronto to take lead from police in 2022

Toronto will launch a pilot program that will see civilians, not police officers, dispatched to 911 calls involving mental-health crises — as long as violence is not being threatened, city council voted on Tuesday.

Council also approved a motion by Mayor John Tory to fast-track parts of the plan and review 911 call services in 2021 to determine how best to dispatch help through the proposed new service.

The plan calls for four crisis support teams in different parts of the city to respond to some of the roughly 30,000 calls for people in crisis that go through 911 each year.

Pilot programs are to be launched in early 2022 and were scheduled to be fully implemented in 2026 if proven successful.

Tory’s motion called for full implementation by 2025.

“Putting something else in place is not a simple task. It is necessary that we do it properly,” said Tory, in bringing forward the motion. Nonetheless, the mayor said, he believes it can be done more quickly.

Asante Haughton, a mentalhealth advocate and co-founder of the Reach Out Response Network, focused on transformational change in mental-health crisis response, said the move is another rung on the ladder to a more equitable society.

“I really see this as an opportunity to transform the way that we think about mental health and transform the way that we think about social service and community building in general,” he said.

He credited the Black Lives Matter movement with helping to draw attention to the issue.

The BLM movement sprang up last summer in response to the death of a Black man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and erupted into worldwide protests that included calls to defund police and put responsibility for policing into different hands.

Days after the Floyd incident, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29year-old Afro-Indigenous woman, fell to her death from the 24th floor of a High Park apartment building in the presence of Toronto police. Officers had been called to help resolve a volatile family dispute and mental-health situation that involved knives; Korchinski-Paquet’s mother had wanted her taken to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Soon after the Korchinski-Paquet tragedy, city council directed the city manager to develop an alternative model. (One of the new teams will serve Indigenous communities.) Toronto Police Services currently spends 180,000 hours investigating the 30,000 annual calls for people in crisis, Denise Campbell, the city official in charge of the new program, told councillors at the meeting, adding that hospital wait times may be a contributing factor. A person in crisis was defined as someone experiencing a temporary breakdown of their coping mechanisms, including those experiencing homelessness.

Ward 14 Coun. Paula Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth), pointed out Tuesday that the program has not led to reduced funding for Toronto Police Services. Ward 5 Coun. Frances Nunziata (York South Weston), a member of the TPS board, said that TPS have agreed to train 911 operators to handle calls for the new crisis response teams, and also that TPS submitted a 2021 budget that does not include an increase in funding over last year. She scolded councillors for seeking to defund police, saying people in her ward want more policing.

Council will resume Wednesday morning.

“I really see this as an opportunity to transform the way that we think about mental health.” ASANTE HAUGHTON MENTAL-HEALTH ADVOCATE